Culture
The Hall of Fame isn't calling, but 'Bad Moon' Rison left a different kind of legacy

Every year the call didn’t come, the tears would.
So would the disbelief. The anger. The nights of lost sleep.
For Andre Rison it was like a knife in the side, his annual rejection from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Hadn’t he done enough? Wasn’t he one of the best of his era? He came to dwell on the disrespect, convinced he belonged, convinced there had to be some reason why he wasn’t getting in.
“There’s nothing Jerry Rice could do that I couldn’t,” Rison has said more than once over the years.
Deep down, he believes that.
But Rice has the records, the gold jacket resting on his shoulders, the GOAT chain dangling from his neck. Rison has the notoriety that lingers after a chaotic career, then fades. Maybe this was payback, he figured. Maybe it was punishment. He played loud. He lived loud. Andre “Bad Moon” Rison was the NFL’s most outspoken receiver before the NFL was awash in outspoken receivers.
That’s gotta be it, he kept telling himself as the years passed and the call from Canton never came. It wasn’t football — it couldn’t just be football. It was everything else.
It had to be.
Still, the man wasn’t about to apologize. Not for the climb and not for the fall. Not for lashing out at coaches, quarterbacks, even an entire city. Not for brawling with Deion Sanders at the 20-yard line of the Georgia Dome. Not for the touchdown dances that earned him racist letters from fans. Not for dating the pop star who burned down his mansion. Not for partying with Tupac.
Not for any of the baggage that trailed him for most of his seven-city, 11-year NFL odyssey.
This man was never going to fit neatly into a box.
“When I played,” Rison says now, “the thinking was, if you was African-American, then you could only be great at one thing: football. That was it.
“I said, leave that lane for somebody else.”
His ambitions ran deeper. He was one of the first pro athletes to fuse sports and hip-hop — “I changed the culture,” Rison boasts. He started record labels. He opened businesses. He carried his community with him.
The ride was rocky, littered with mistakes. The arrests. The drama. The millions he burned through — Rison once bought a Ferrari Testarossa without knowing the sticker price and admits to owning 34 different Mercedes-Benzes over the years. A night out in his younger days set him back $15,000.
He courted the spotlight even when it was the last thing he needed. When a reporter once asked if he was the Dennis Rodman of the NFL, Rison nodded, taking it as a compliment.
In some ways, he was ahead of his time. Before Keyshawn Johnson was screaming “Give me the damn ball!” and Terrell Owens was doing crunches in his driveway for the TV cameras and Chad Johnson was slipping on a homemade Hall of Fame jacket on the sideline, Rison was blowing up the tired old narrative that said receivers need only run their routes, catch the ball and keep quiet.
Three decades later, the 57-year-old is asked if the tumult that often trailed him ever got in the way of football. Rison scoffs. He’s offended. This is a man who once bought a T-shirt that read, “When God made me, he was just showing off.”
“You remember when Michael Jordan went gambling the night before a playoff game and everyone killed him for it, and the next night he lit their ass up?” Rison asks. “Ain’t no distractions when you different. Mike’s different. I’m different. I been different.
“This is Bad Moon we’re talking about.”
Andre Rison finished second in Rookie of the Year voting with the Colts. Soon, he was gone. (Getty, Allsport)
It was ESPN’s Chris Berman who tapped him with the nickname, inspired by the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. In 1989, at the tail end of Rison’s rookie year with the Colts, he was pulled over for driving 128 miles per hour in a 55-mph zone. He told the cops he was only going 95.
I see the bad moon a-rising
I see trouble on the way
“The nickname changed my life forever,” Rison wrote in his book, “Wide Open.” For better or worse, he came to embrace it, getting “Bad Moon Rison” tattooed on his bicep.
The song was right: trouble followed. But so did a scintillating career.
Rison played with a fire first lit on the hardscrabble streets of Flint, Mich., where, as a high school star, a local mobster — Rison calls him Mafia Sal — would slip him wads of cash from time to time, urging him to pick a particular college and sign with a particular agent. Rison says he ignored him. He was going to make it his way.
He did. At Michigan State, he played basketball, made All-Big Ten in track and field and was an All-American wide receiver. “Could’ve made $3 million a year in NIL deals today,” Rison says. A first-round pick of the Colts in 1989, he finished second in Offensive Rookie of the Year voting to Barry Sanders. The Colts missed the playoffs by a game. The future felt bright, and Rison was one of the biggest reasons why.
He was gone a few months later, shipped to Atlanta in a trade that gave the Colts the chance to draft quarterback Jeff George first overall. Rison was crushed. His teammates were, too.
“Heartbroken,” says former Colts linebacker Jeff Herrod. “He had some Marvin Harrison in him. Without Rison, our team went in the craps.”
In Atlanta, Rison grew into one of the best wideouts in the game, earning four straight trips to the Pro Bowl. At 6-feet, 188 pounds, he was undersized but unafraid, lethal between the numbers, quick as a cat. “Nobody could separate like he could,” says his coach with the Falcons, Jerry Glanville. “He had the best change-of-direction I’ve ever seen.”
There wasn’t a cornerback in football who scared him, and after every catch, Rison welcomed the contact that came his way. He was once walloped so hard in a game that Glanville wondered for a solid minute if he’d ever get up. “I thought he could be dead,” the coach remembers. But Rison always came back for more.
“I’d like to think I was one of the greatest to go over the middle,” he says. “If not the greatest.”
There was a swagger to his game, a style that fit the Falcons and a city coming into its own. Atlanta was becoming a hotbed of hip-hop, and Rison — along with Deion Sanders, his teammate and the league’s best defensive back — were two of the biggest catalysts. The pair became the faces of the hungry upstart.
And they did it different.
“We football players were told we couldn’t get no endorsements, those were for the basketball and baseball players,” Rison says. “They said we couldn’t get commercials, we couldn’t get involved with music. Deion and I didn’t listen.”
They signed with Nike. They starred in commercials. They popped up in MC Hammer’s music videos. They spoke their minds to the media, consequences be damned.
And they backed it up on Sundays.

GO DEEPER
Is the Deion Sanders way working at Colorado? It depends which way you look at it
By 1993, Rison had more catches in his first five seasons than any receiver in history. Glanville’s rule was simple: Whenever the Falcons advanced inside the red zone, get the ball to No. 80. Period. “I’d tell my QBs, ‘I don’t care if he busts a route and you don’t know where the hell he’s going, just find Rison,’” the coach says. “He’d run over the entire defense to get in the end zone.”
The numbers piled up. The wins didn’t. Sanders bolted for San Francisco before the 1994 season and put on a show a few months later in his return to the Georgia Dome, throwing punches at Rison — punches Rison returned — before taking an interception back 93 yards and high-stepping into the end zone.
Rison was gone a year later, signing a five-year $17 million deal with the Browns, at the time the richest ever for a wide receiver. But he never lived up to it. He showed up to training camp out of shape, grew frustrated with the scheme and clashed with coach Bill Belichick.
Late that year, while rumors of the Browns’ move to Baltimore swirled, Rison lashed out at the fans after a loss to Green Bay in which he was repeatedly booed. “Baltimore here we come,” were his infamous words in front of the TV cameras. Rison says in the weeks that followed, he received death threats. Most in Cleveland never forgave him.
Rison flamed out in Jacksonville after failing to mesh with quarterback Mark Brunell, whom Rison took shots at in the media after his exit. A few months later, he was helping the Packers win Super Bowl XXXI, snagging a 54-yard touchdown from Brett Favre on the team’s second offensive snap. It was so loud in the New Orleans Superdome that night that Rison couldn’t even hear Favre’s audible at the line of scrimmage. No matter. He snuck behind the defense and went untouched for the score.
He was a world champion.

Andre Rison takes a reception in for a score during the Packers’ Super Bowl XXXI victory at the Superdome. (Brian Bahr, Peter Brouillet / Getty Images)
In the days leading up to the game, he ran into Belichick before practice. “Hey pipsqueak,” the coach blurted out, “why didn’t you play like this for me?” Rison’s response: “Because you didn’t have an offensive coordinator.” Both laughed.
In Kansas City, Rison earned a fifth Pro Bowl nod and a new nickname, “Spiderman,” for his acrobatic catches in the end zone. But his time in the league was winding down, and after spending the 2000 season with the Raiders, Rison was out. One last triumph came in 2004 when he helped the Toronto Argonauts to a CFL Grey Cup.
Football was finished. Nothing in Rison’s life was about to get any easier.
After his girlfriend burned down his house, Rison hopped on his motorcycle, sped out of his subdivision and considered killing himself.
“I can’t take it!” he screamed.
The rain poured.
“All I had to do was wiggle the bike, just one good time, and I was headed straight into the median,” he wrote in “Wide Open.” “It would all be over in an instant.”
The relationship was volatile, the drama unending. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes — one-third of the Grammy-winning group TLC — had returned to Rison’s Atlanta home one night in June 1994 and found him with another woman. She collected dozens of pairs of his shoes, piled them up in the bathtub, then lit them on fire.
His $2 million mansion was torched. The incident made national news. Lopes was charged with first-degree arson.
The scene Rison has never been able to push from his mind: seeing Lopes climb into a car and drive off with Tupac Shakur, a close friend of his at the time — Shakur actually filmed his music video with MC Breed, “Gotta get mine,” at one of Rison’s homes.
A week later, Rison was holding Lopes’ hand during her court hearing. They planned to marry until she was killed in a car accident in Honduras in 2002.
By then Rison’s NFL career was over. He stumbled trying to find what was next. His estimated $19 million in career earnings? Mostly gone. “Some guys had a gambling problem,” Rison said in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, “Broke.” “Well, I had a spending problem.” Over the years, in addition to the 34 Benzes, he bought 14 BMWs, several Ferraris and too many trucks to count. He claims to have spent over $1 million on jewelry. He once lent a friend $30,000 to open a frozen drink café, then never saw a penny of profit.
The partying caught up to him. Rison’s inner circle ballooned to 20, 30, even 40 people. He paid for everything. He remembers lying in bed after a night out with $10,000 in cash sprawled out on the floor, $5,000 tucked in his pocket and $7,500 more stashed in his coat. He spread himself too thin. Eventually, the money ran out.
“Everybody used to say, and still does, that all Dre ever did away from the game was give, give, give,” Rison says. He says he picked it up from his grandmother back in Flint, who’d welcome strangers into her house on Christmas just so she could cook them a warm meal.
A coach left him with a warning early in his career, words Rison never forgot: “You keep messing up, and one day I’m gonna pull up in my shiny white Cadillac and ask, ‘Hey Dre, how about a wash?’”
Rison pledged he wouldn’t let that happen.
It never did. But his finances were a mess. His legal issues piled up — over the years, he’s been arrested for felony theft and disorderly conduct, and in 2022 he was charged with failing to pay child support. (Rison has four sons.) He avoided jail time by pleading down. Finally, he filed for bankruptcy.
He started coaching. He opened a business training young athletes. Then he met the woman who would offer him the type of stability he’d always needed. He helped her beat breast cancer, and together, they’re raising four daughters in his home state of Michigan.
Her name? Lisa Lopez.
He feels the remnants of all those trips over the middle every morning when he wakes up.
Rison says he has Arthritis in 18 different places. He has bone spurs in his neck. He’s had his jaw dislocated, his teeth knocked out, all 10 of his fingers broken at one point or another.
“You have to learn how to deal with depression,” Rison says, “and how to fight it.”
And he had to learn to move on, to stop obsessing over the Hall of Fame. He’s been a finalist several times, and for years, the rejection ate at him. He’d watch cornerbacks he used to embarrass make it in, and he’d steam. He’d tell a reporter he was “the best receiver to ever play the game” and vow to start his own Hall of Fame, Canton be damned. He’d belittle Rice’s gaudy numbers, claiming they were merely a product of him playing with Joe Montana and Steve Young.
What would he have done, Rison asked, if he’d played with one of those QBs instead of Chris Miller and Bobby Hebert?
Rison’s old teammate, Herrod, has wondered the same thing. “Put Andre Rison on the Cowboys or 49ers back in the day and it would’ve been a whole different story,” he says.
Rison believes that to his core. When he grabbed a photo with Randy Moss a few years back, this was the caption he wrote: “THE TWO GREATEST OF ALL TIME IN MY EYES.” When he was inducted into Michigan State’s Hall of Fame in 2022, Rison began his speech with this: “I never dreamed of being in the MSU Hall of Fame, but I always dreamed of being in the damn NFL Hall of Fame.”
It’s tormented him for years. It probably always will.
The numbers aren’t there, not after the offensive eruption of the 2000s, when 1,200-yard receiving seasons became routine. Rison currently sits 22nd all-time in touchdowns (84), tied for 48th in career catches (743) and 52nd in yards (10,205).
His chance at Canton came and went. He says he’s let it go. He says the bitterness is gone. He says he’s done losing sleep over it. He knows what he did on the field.
And if the way he did it — the hip-hop connections and the partying, the rapper girlfriend and the off-the-field headlines — cost him in the voters’ eyes, fine. Rison paved a path, he says, that athletes have been following ever since. That’s a different kind of legacy.
“I opened doors,” Rison says. “Everybody wasn’t willing to indulge in entertainment and hip-hop back then. When my teammates were on the golf course, I was meeting with Sony Records.”
These days, he pours himself into his passions. He wrote “Wide Open” and produced a movie about his life by the same name. He was recently promoted to interim head coach at University Liggett, a high school outside of Detroit. He shuttles his daughters to school and practices. He popped up on “Celebrity Family Feud” and announced the Falcons’ second-round pick at the draft in April.
“I’m living an even better life off the field than when I played,” Rison says. “I’d always prefer the way it went. And I damn sure wouldn’t change anything about where I’m at right now.”
Rison claims — along with Sanders, his close friend and the coach at Colorado — that both “are just as relevant as we were when we played.” Sanders, perhaps the most controversial figure in college football, might even be more relevant. Bad Moon Rison sees himself in the same vein, even if he’s the only one who still does.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Al Bello / Allsport, Otto Greule / Allsport, Robert Seale / Sporting News/Icon SMI)

Culture
Try to Match These Snarky Quotations to Their Novels and Stories

Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that challenges you to match a book’s memorable lines with its title. This week’s installment is focused on bold observations made by characters from assorted novels and short stories. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books themselves if you want to get a copy and see that quotation in context.
Culture
16 Mayors on What It’s Like to Run a U.S. City Now Under Trump

It is no ordinary time to lead a city. Budgets are in flux. Divisions are deepening. Political violence and misinformation are growing concerns. And as President Trump aggressively pursues his agenda, national politics are becoming an inescapable reality in city halls.
The New York Times sat down last month with 16 mayors at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Tampa, Fla. We asked them many of the same questions. Their answers revealed deep, bipartisan uncertainty over federal funding and concerns about rising incivility. Mayors of some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, did not attend.
Some Republican mayors spoke hopefully about this new Trump era. Many others, especially Democrats, who hold the majority of big-city mayoral jobs, voiced alarm about how the administration’s policies were playing out.
Here’s what we heard.
Across party lines, this one issue was a persistent concern.
Americans have been telling their mayors that they are worried about everyday costs and struggling to afford a place to live.
With home prices rising and supply limited, several mayors said they were trying to build more units and meet demand. It was a challenge playing out in nearly every city, with young professionals struggling to buy their first houses and growing homeless populations straining city services.
Mayors told us what else was keeping them up at night.
They described spending significant time outside the office worrying about local and national problems. As the mayor of Noblesville, Ind., put it: “My job is not nine to five. I’m mayor regardless of where I am.”
Some described the fear of receiving a phone call with news of another shooting. Others spoke about wanting to fix endemic issues like homelessness and drug addiction.
Governing a city feels different under President Trump, most mayors said.
Mayor Chris Jensen (R)
Noblesville, Ind.
Mayor Donna Deegan (D)
Jacksonville, Fla.
Mayor Jerry Dyer (R)
Fresno, Calif.
Mayor Regina Romero (D)
Tucson, Ariz.
Mayor Kathy Sheehan (D)
Albany, N.Y.
Mayor Alyia Gaskins (D)
Alexandria, Va.
Mayor Mattie Parker (R)
Fort Worth
With the Trump administration seeking to rapidly overhaul parts of the federal government, mayors from both parties described uncertainty over the fate of federal grants and other programs that Republicans in Washington have targeted.
Many Democrats said they had strong relationships with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s staff members and had not yet built those same connections with Mr. Trump’s team. Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago, whose city has been singled out for criticism by Mr. Trump, said that “the very basic fundamental rights of our democracy are under siege.”
Some Republicans described optimism about working with the new president, and not all of them had seen major changes. Mayor D.C. Reeves of Pensacola, Fla., said that “it’s probably too early to say that there’s a distinct difference.” Mayor Acquanetta Warren of Fontana, Calif., said it was “not at all” different. “We work with anyone,” she said.
We also asked whether mayors had changed their routines because of political violence.
Several mayors said they had taken additional steps to ensure their safety since the killing of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in June and other recent attacks. But political violence, many of them noted, was not new. Mayor Regina Romero of Tucson, a Democrat, pointed to the attempted assassination of Representative Gabby Giffords in her city in 2011.
And Mayor Indya Kincannon of Knoxville, a Democrat, said she had been inside a local church with her young daughters when a gunman opened fire in 2008, killing two people, in an attack linked to hatred of liberals and gay people. She remembered escaping with her daughters. “I picked them up and left as soon as the gunman was tackled,” she said.
Mayor Todd Gloria (D)
San Diego
“It’s a difficult time for people in public office, and when we see the tragedy that just happened in Minnesota, you always have to wonder, you know, am I next?”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D)
Chicago
“No. But what I can say is with the political violence that has been promulgating, there’s no place for it.”

Mayor Alyia Gaskins (D)
Alexandria, Va.
“I have. I would say in light of recent violence, I’m much more aware of my surroundings and also those of my family.”

Mayor Kathy Sheehan (D)
Albany, N.Y.
“For those of us who are elected officials, it is an uneasy time.”

Mayor Jerry Dyer (R)
Fresno, Calif.
“As a former police chief and spending 40 years in law enforcement, I’m keenly aware of the fact that there’s always a potential for a threat of violence against you, but it doesn’t mean that we’re always constantly aware of that threat. But I have become much more alert as of late in terms of my surroundings.”

Mayor Quentin Hart (D)
Waterloo, Iowa
“One of the things that we’ve done immediately was to take more precautions within City Hall.”

Mayor Brett Smiley (D)
Providence, R.I.
“I haven’t made changes to how I interact with my community, but I will admit that my stress and anxiety level is up a little bit higher.”

Mayor D.C. Reeves (R)
Pensacola, Fla.
“Nothing permanent yet, but I’m certainly watching it.”
Immigration enforcement is creating fear in many cities, too.
Mayors from both parties called on the federal government to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.
“You couldn’t talk to a mayor who doesn’t want immigration reform,” said Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany, a Democrat. “We want Washington to fix this.”
But as the Trump administration works to increase deportations and remove legal status for some immigrants, mayors said that some in their cities were living in constant fear of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Mayor Brandon Johnson (D)
Chicago
Mayor Acquanetta Warren (R)
Fontana, Calif.
Mayor Brett Smiley (D)
Providence, R.I.
Mayor D.C. Reeves (R)
Pensacola, Fla.
Mayor Quentin Hart (D)
Waterloo, Iowa
Mayor Jerry Dyer (R)
Fresno, Calif.
Mayor Regina Romero (D)
Tucson, Ariz.
Mayor Mattie Parker (R)
Fort Worth
Mayors also pointed to local programs that could be national models.

Mayor Chris Jensen (R)
Noblesville, Ind.
“I had a local therapist approach me and ask, ‘Hey, would you go on Facebook and do a live therapy session to talk about what it’s like to be a leader during Covid?’ Of course, my initial answer was, ‘Absolutely not, I don’t want to go share my emotions with my community.’”
“But I ended up relenting and doing it. It was one of the best things I ever did. It was literally an hourlong therapy session talking about my feelings, about being a leader during such an uncertain time. That project has morphed into, now, a monthly program called ‘Mental Health Monday.’”
He added: “We have now comforted a community and a city and shown that it’s OK to not be OK.”

Mayor Acquanetta Warren (R)
Fontana, Calif.
“Right now, the biggest challenge in our city is homelessness. That’s what our public is looking to see us resolve, so we’re on steroids doing that. We just bought a hotel last year, which allows us to put people off the street in an environment where they can get major assistance to transform their lives.”

Mayor Regina Romero (D)
Tucson, Ariz.
“We’ve planted more than 150,000 trees in the last six years. We created a heat tree map where we take a look at the areas of our city that have less canopy. Because trees are a nature-based solution to heat and climate.”

Mayor Todd Gloria (D)
San Diego
“Last year, despite high interest rates and high inflation, we permitted about 8,800 new homes in my city, more than double what we’ve been doing historically. The reforms that we’re putting in place to make it possible to build more homes for less and to build them faster is working.”
We wanted to know what policy change under Trump was having the biggest impact, too.
We spoke to the mayors before Congress passed Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill. They told us they had spent months bracing for severe cuts to federal funding for local programs, though many of their worst-case fears had not materialized at that point.
Some described the pausing of grants while the Trump administration re-evaluated previously approved projects, leaving cities in limbo. In places where the local economy is highly dependent on international trade, mayors voiced concern about the uncertainty around tariffs.
Mayor Brandon Johnson (D)
Chicago
Mayor Todd Gloria (D)
San Diego
Mayor Alyia Gaskins (D)
Alexandria, Va.
Mayor Brett Smiley (D)
Providence, R.I.
Mayor Chris Jensen (R)
Noblesville, Ind.
Mayor D.C. Reeves (R)
Pensacola, Fla.
Mayor Cavalier Johnson (D)
Milwaukee
And mayors told us what they had learned about the United States in the last year.
Both Republicans and Democrats said the depth of the country’s political divisions had become even more clear in recent months. Some Democrats said they were still processing Mr. Trump’s return to power and what it means for the country’s future.
Mayor Todd Gloria (D)
San Diego
Mayor Daniel Rickenmann (R)
Columbia, S.C.
Mayor Regina Romero (D)
Tucson, Ariz.
Mayor Jerry Dyer (R)
Fresno, Calif.
Mayor Brandon Johnson (D)
Chicago
Mayor D.C. Reeves (R)
Pensacola, Fla.
Mayor Indya Kincannon (D)
Knoxville, Tenn.
Mayor Alyia Gaskins (D)
Alexandria, Va.
We also asked some lighter questions, like which TV or streaming show they liked best.
Mayors also revealed their favorite after-work beverages.
Many mayors were eager to plug local craft breweries. Mayor Daniel Rickenmann of Columbia gave a shout-out to the Kentucky distillery that he cofounded. Others preferred a particular soft drink.
We asked them to brag about their cities’ signature dishes, too.
They boasted about a Friday night fish fry in Milwaukee, fish tacos in San Diego and Mexican food in Fresno and Fontana. Knoxville’s mayor suggested “meat and three,” the local term for meat and three side dishes, while Pensacola’s mayor highlighted his city’s seafood.
Two mayors shared different theories on hot dogs. And two Midwestern mayors boasted about their pork tenderloins.
Their bookshelves are also as varied as their cities.
When asked about the best book they had read recently, mayors shared a range of fiction and nonfiction titles.
Mayor Alyia Gaskins of Alexandria said much of her reading time was spent with her young children, who enjoy “Little Blue Truck” and “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site.” The mayors of Fontana, Knoxville and San Diego all praised “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

Mayor Jerry Dyer (R)
Fresno, Calif.
“One Blood” by John M. Perkins

Mayor Kathy Sheehan (D)
Albany, N.Y.
“A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles

Mayor Donna Deegan (D)
Jacksonville, Fla.
“The Wisdom Pattern” by Richard Rohr

Mayor D.C. Reeves (R)
Pensacola, Fla.
“A Land Remembered” by Patrick D. Smith. “It’s a novel, but it’s kind of on the history of Florida.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D)
Chicago
“Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr. “I recommend that people across America take a look at it, particularly at a time in which the carceral state is something that’s being enacted, especially by this federal government.”

Mayor Daniel Rickenmann (R)
Columbia, S.C.
“Rockets’ Red Glare” by William Webster and Dick Lochte

Mayor Quentin Hart (D)
Waterloo, Iowa
“The 1619 Project” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is from Waterloo. Also “Anesa, No Skola Today” by Anesa Kajtazovic, a children’s book about growing up during the Bosnian War.

Mayor Chris Jensen (R)
Noblesville, Ind.
“The Circle Maker” by Mark Batterson. “It’s all about big prayers, big bold ideas.”

Mayor Brett Smiley (D)
Providence, R.I.
“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara. “Probably the saddest book I’ve ever read, but it was really, really, really well written and wonderful.”

Mayor Regina Romero (D)
Tucson, Ariz.
“The Teenage Brain” by Dr. Frances E. Jensen. “That really has helped me understand my teenagers and why they do the things they do.”

Mayor Mattie Parker (R)
Fort Worth
“On Leadership” by Tony Blair. “It’s incredibly thought provoking as a leader. I probably should have read it at the beginning of my administration, but I’ve learned quite a bit.”

Mayor Cavalier Johnson (D)
Milwaukee
“I’m reading it right now: ‘A Promised Land’ by Barack Obama. I’m a little behind because I’m mayor and I’ve got three kids, but I’m making up for it now.”
Finally, we wanted to know what gave mayors hope for the United States.
Across party lines, mayors spoke about frightening political divisions, seemingly intractable problems and serious fears about the future. But most also voiced optimism about the country, drawing hope from America’s history and especially from the people they meet in their own cities.
Culture
Match Five International Cities to Popular Book Titles

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights fictional works with the names of real international cities in their titles. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading.
-
Business1 week ago
See How Trump’s Big Bill Could Affect Your Taxes, Health Care and Other Finances
-
Culture1 week ago
16 Mayors on What It’s Like to Run a U.S. City Now Under Trump
-
Politics6 days ago
Video: Trump Signs the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Into Law
-
Science1 week ago
Federal contractors improperly dumped wildfire-related asbestos waste at L.A. area landfills
-
News1 week ago
Video: Who Loses in the Republican Policy Bill?
-
Politics1 week ago
Congressman's last day in office revealed after vote on Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill'
-
Technology1 week ago
Meet Soham Parekh, the engineer burning through tech by working at three to four startups simultaneously
-
World6 days ago
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,227